Harry’s interview with WWII Oral History Project

In his interview with the World War II Oral History Project, Harry recalled that Aug. 15, 1945, was the day President Truman announced the end of the war. He also mentioned another reason for the date’s significance, as you’ll see in the transcript on this page. I first heard the interview after Harry died, on a CD our family obtained from the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Later I found the audio cassette tape Harry had saved from the interview, which took place in his Leisure World apartment community in Silver Spring, MD.


Murray: This is August 28, 2007, Leisure World of Maryland Oral History Project of World War II. We’re interviewing Harry Zubkoff, who was born June 16, 1921. He served in the Army becoming a Staff Sergeant. My name’s Murray Seeger. I’m helped by Adel Schwartz.

Well Harry, you told us you’re from Buffalo, North Buffalo. I’m from the south side of Buffalo, about 15 miles. [Both chuckle.] Where were you on December 7, 1941?

Harry: I was working for the Bell Aircraft Corporation. We were already on a three-shift program there producing airplanes, mostly for sale to Russia.

Murray: This is also North Buffalo?

Harry: Yes, Bell Aircraft plant on Elmwood near Hertel.

Murray: Yes, my mother went there part time as an inspector.

Photos on this page from Harry’s Army album and files

Harry: How ’bout that.

Murray: How ’bout that. And you were 20 years old. And what was your skill, what was your training?

Harry: I had spent six or eight months at the Burgard Vocational School learning how to do things like riveting and soldering and valving and all of that, the kind of skills they were looking for in the war plants. And I went to work at Bell in the fall of 1939.

Murray: Now they were making a fighter plane at that time, right?

Harry: Yes.

Murray: What was it called?

Harry: It was called the Airacobra P-39.

Murray: Right, and you said they’re largely being sold to Russia at that time.

Harry: Yes, they were. It was an unusual design aircraft because it did not have an engine in front; it had an engine right underneath the pilot in the middle of the airplane.

Murray: And it had a cannon in the front nose.

Harry: And a cannon in the front, right.

Murray: I remember that. And on the other side of Buffalo they were making the P-40s.

Harry: That’s right, at Curtiss.

Murray: Yep, Curtiss-Wright. Now, were you working on December 7th, you think?

Harry: Yes, we were working. They had a loud speaker in the plant. Around noon or 1:00 I think it was, the loud speaker came on and there was an announcement that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Everybody stopped working for a few minutes, and a dozen guys – within my sight – dropped all their equipment and said they’re going down to enlist.

Murray: Oh my goodness.


Harry: There was a general exodus almost every day from that point on; men were getting up, going out, and enlisting right away.

Murray: Amazing reaction.

Harry: It was.

Murray: Did you know where Pearl Harbor was?

Harry: At the time I didn’t, no, but I found out soon afterwards.

Murray: Now what was your family situation at that time?

Harry: Well, let’s say this. My parents were both terminally ill. I was the only breadwinner in the family, and I was working and taking care of both my mother and father. I had two married sisters living in Buffalo, and they pitched in as much as they could, but they both had little children, and you know, times were tough, it was the Depression, and their husbands were not making much money, so they really couldn’t help. So, that’s what I was doing.

Murray: Now, you registered for the draft at this point.

Harry: Oh yes.

Murray: Were you called up?

Harry: I was deferred because I was working at a war plant.

Murray: And you were also support for your parents I would think.

Harry: Well, I don’t know if that entered in to their calculations.

Murray: Ok. Did you continue working? When did you actually enter into the service?

Harry: July 1945.

Murray: Now were you drafted at that point?

Harry: Yeah, we were all – maybe 10 or 12 thousand were laid off in January 1945. Contracts expired; the company was, say, contracting.

Murray: That plane wasn’t very successful.

Harry: No, it wasn’t used by Americans.

Murray: The Air Force didn’t like it very much.

Harry: No.

Murray: Now the war in Europe was over.

Harry: That’s right.

Murray: And you’re called in. Where did they send you?

Harry: They sent me to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, for basic training. Mind you, I wanted to get
into the Air Force. I had a private pilot license.

Murray: My goodness.

Harry: But the Air Force didn’t need people anymore, so they put me in with combat engineers for basic training.

Murray: You think it was for your mechanical skills?

Harry: Probably.

Murray: Where did you go for basic training for combat engineers?

Harry: Camp Claiborne, Louisiana.

Murray: Oh, Ok, I’m sorry, I thought that was another camp. Sixteen weeks?

Harry: Sixteen weeks.

Murray: And from there?

Harry: From there, they yanked me out of there just before the group was going overseas. We were supposed to go to the Pacific.

Murray: Yeah, you would have been part of the Army invading Japan presumably.

Harry: Right.

Murray: And, do you remember where you were when the bomb was dropped?

Harry: Yeah, that was in September, no, the bombs were dropped in August, and I was in Louisiana.

Murray: You were sweating it out in Louisiana. And the Armistice Truce was signed in September?

Harry: It was signed early in September. As a coincidence, I had been married on August 15th, 1943. On August 15th, 1945, when I was in Louisiana, President Truman announced that the war is officially over. But it wasn’t signed in Japan until later, in September.

Murray: Right. Your service was supposed to be what, the duration and six months?

Harry: Yes.

Murray: But you have to have points?

Harry: Well, I didn’t have any points.

Murray: And from Louisiana, where did they ship you?

Harry: They sent me to Baltimore, to go to intelligence school. Fort Holabird in Baltimore. I went to intelligence school for three or four months, then they shipped me out to France.

Fort Holabird, Baltimore, 1946

Murray: Now what kind of intelligence were you supposed to be doing?

Harry: Counterintelligence.

Murray: Now you’re going to interview people?

Harry: Yes.

Murray: Do you have a language?

Harry: They taught me German. And theoretically I was fairly fluent in German.

Murray: Sprichst du Deutsch?

Harry: Not anymore. You know, when was that, 60 years ago or so? I haven’t used it since I got out.

Murray: So you finished at Fort Holabird and you’re shipped out to France?

Harry: First to France, then to Germany.

Murray: And where were you stationed there?
 
Harry: In Germany for a while in Stuttgart [?], then in a little provincial town called Buchen, not far from Stuttgart, not far from a famous resort called Vadmerventine [?].

Murray: Now what is your job?

Harry: Well, you know, the basic job of counterintelligence was to investigate cases of sabotage, espionage, subversive activities, that sort of thing. But we, basically we were being used at the time for two purposes. One, to trace down wanted Nazi war criminals and to get evidence against them for use in war crimes trials. And the other one was to help build up a network of people who would continue to provide us with information. And, we were worried at the time about the increasing hostility with Russia. In the intelligence business, we were taught so much about the Nazi paramilitary organizations and all of their political organizations, etcetera, and we started taking lessons in the same things in regards to the Russians and the communists. So we were working on both trying to figure out what the communists were doing and also tracing Nazi war criminals.

Murray: Had you been promoted by now?

Harry: Just normal promotions, Corporal and Sergeant. They wanted me to go to officer candidate school, but I didn’t want to commit myself to a longer term in the Army.

Murray: But you must have impressed some people, you must have done well whatever you were doing.

Harry: Well, in those Army aptitute tests. And of course all the reports I wrote were models of English composition.

Murray: That’s because of the good education in Buffalo public schools.

Harry: I got to tell you that some of the officers couldn’t read or write English in my view.

Murray: You stationed in this small town in Germany all the time and traveling around?
How far away did you get?

Harry: I was sent on several missions. I spent some time in a DP camp trying to find these couple infiltrators.

Murray: Did you have some identified or just smelling around?

Harry: Smelling around mostly. Well we did have a few.

Murray: Was that over in the east part of Germany, toward Munich or in that area?

Harry: Yea, we were in Munich. There were Displaced Persons camps all over the area. I spent some time in one near Dachau, the concentration camp at Dachau. It set up a DP camp mainly for Jewish people, who couldn’t tell the difference between that and the concentration camps.

Murray: Right.


Harry: And I had a lot of interaction with them, who found that American Jewish soldiers were a breed apart.

Murray: Good or bad?

Harry: Good.

Murray: They didn’t think the other American troops were sympathetic or understood the problem?

Harry: Well, they didn’t know that Jewish people could be warriors or in the Army.

Murray: Did you speak Yiddish?

Harry: I had a little Yiddish. And German is largely or partly based on Yiddish.

Murray: That’s right. So how long was this duty?

Harry: A year.

Murray: Did you find it interesting?

Harry: Oh, fascinating. Now did you ever hear of the Jewish Brigade from Palestine? There were some Jewish guys in the Jewish brigade who wrote a book [book based on them] about their experiences. They were also chasing Nazi war criminals and finding them and killing them. And there was a period of time when my superiors were wondering if I was one of the guys who was finding them and killing them.

Murray: Now is this one of the times when you felt your officers were not sure about Jewish soldiers?

Harry: Not my officers, no, but others in the military government. You know, intelligence and military government were at odds with each other ...

Murray: Right from the get-go.

Harry: Right. And they did a lot of things that the intelligence community really wasn’t happy with. You may have heard how they brought over all the Nazi scientists, and we were against that.

Murray: I think the same thing in trying to fit them in the post war government.

Harry: True. We had started out with a de-nazification program and found out that many of the ex-nazis were being placed in responsible jobs.

Murray: Experienced bureaucrats.

Harry: Right.


Murray: I lived in Germany, I was a reporter in Germany. And this was still being talked about a long time afterwards. So you were there a year. Then what happened to you?

Harry: I came back, got discharged.

Murray: Got your points?

Harry: I guess so. It was after a year and a half they brought me home.

Murray: Where’d you muster out?

Harry: New Jersey.

Murray: Did you go back to Buffalo. Did you use the GI Bill at all?

Harry: Yes. I did, I used the GI Bill to get a commercial pilot’s license. I was working as a flight instructor and commercial pilot for a small aviation school in Buffalo called Mastercraft Aviation – until 1949, when we no longer had any students. The whole bottom dropped out of that aviation market. The post-war world was going to be a flying one, but it didn’t develop that way. And a friend of mine from the intelligence community called me and said we just got a new organization called the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, and I’d like you come down and work for us.

Murray: That was brand new. Harry Truman did sign the papers for that.

Harry: Right. So I came to Washington, and they wanted to hire me, but what they wanted me to do was go overseas and be a spook. Now I had a brand new baby boy, and my wife didn’t want me to go overseas, I didn’t want go. So I turned the job down.

Murray: What did you do then?

Harry: I got a job at the Veterans Administration, and worked there for a year. And then I got a job with the Air Force in the Pentagon, a 90-day job with the Air Force. That was in 1950. And 36 years later I retired. A long 90 days.

Murray: What kind of work did you do?

Harry: It was the best job in the world. What I did in the Pentagon was put together compilations of news clippings about military affairs which grew and grew as more and more people were writing about the Department of Defense.

Murray: Did you have to get up at 4 in the morning?

Harry: Well, I did, actually at 2. We called it the Current News. Subsequently the earliest edition became the Early Bird edition. It’s still in existence.

Murray: It’s famous.

Harry: Yeah, and I was famous for a while.

Murray: Did you have any uniformed working for you?

Harry: In the beginning we had uniformed people, but, around the mid-1950s, early ’60s, till then we had uniformed people. As our job expanded see, we did more than put out news clippings. We also were writing speeches for the Secretary of the Air Force and also for the Secretary of Defense. So I had a small research outfit, mainly writers, and they were military people. Around the mid-’60s, they took all the military out, put them in a separate division. It was all civilian. I was the chief of that division from about the mid-’60s to the mid-’80s when I retired.

Murray: Well thank you very much, Harry. It’s a marvelous story. I appreciate your coming in.


I Googled the interviewer, Murray Seeger. He was a seasoned journalist and wrote the book “Discovering Russia: 200 years of American Journalism”. He passed away three years before Harry, at age 82.

Harry wrote novels, too

Harry in the early 1960s

Last year on this blog, I posted a slew of unpublished short stories Harry wrote during his life. Most I discovered in his boxed paper files, a few on his computer. He also left behind hard-copy versions of never-published fictional novels; or in some cases, partial versions. Several he may have drafted in the 1950s, when his Army experience was still fresh in his mind, and perhaps edited in the ’60s or later. To give you a taste of one, here’s the synopsis from his book proposal, plus the first few paragraphs of the novel’s introduction.

The book proposal

Synopsis

Clarence Webster, a commercial pilot and flight instructor before the war, joined the Army shortly before Pearl Harbor and eventually was assigned to fly artillery spotting missions and light liaison planes in the combat zone. When his unarmed plane is shot down and he is wounded and temporarily grounded, he is transferred to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. After the war ends he responds to an urgent appeal by the Army to stay on as an intelligence agent with the military occupation forces, at least for another year. Though he is eligible to return home, he agrees to stay, and subsequently extend the year for an additional six months. He finally returns to the States in December, 1946.

The story takes place in two main time periods – the last nine months of 1947 when he is a civilian in the States, and the last nine months of 1946, when he is winding up his tour of active duty in Germany. Like all veterans, he has had his fill of war, and of the Army, and of man’s cynicism and seeming inability to learn the bitter lessons of the war. He has returned to his pre-war profession as a flight instructor, but he is restless and dissatisfied, searching for some new answers, trying to “find himself”.

Though he is engaged to the “girl back home”, he cannot forget the girl he loved in Germany, even though she had betrayed his love. On the horizon is the growing threat which communism poses in a world hungry for peace and generally unaware of the full extent of the menace. A few people see the danger, but too few are doing anything about it. What, he asks himself, can one man do to help provide a greater measure of security for his country? In the end he breaks his engagement and joins the Air Force. Oddly enough he goes back into uniform for precisely the same reasons he joined up before World War II started, because his country is at war with the enemy – only the war has not yet been declared.

The writing makes extensive use of the flashback technique, contrasting his experiences and reactions during the last nine months of 1947 in Buffalo (the present) with his experiences and reactions during the last nine months of 1946 in Germany (the past), with occasional glimpses into his more distant past. The two women in his life are seen through his eyes, as well as the manner in which they help to shape his character and the effect they have upon his decisions. Though basically a love-adventure story, this is also a novel of a time so unique in American experience that it can never be fully recaptured on paper. It points up the conflict between one man’s desire for freedom and individuality, and that man’s concept of responsibility and obligation.

Introduction

The world of April 1947 was a curious place and a curious time. It was a time of tension and a time of relaxation. It was a time of anxiety and insecurity, and still, a time of hopefulness and aspiration. The aftermath of World War II was still being felt, strongly in some parts of the world, perhaps somewhat dimly in the United States. It was as though the war, like a giant hand from nowhere, had picked up the world by the neck and the seat of the pants and shaken it up a little, and the loose change had dropped out of its pockets and the buttons popped off its vest and everything was all jumbled up and confused and the pieces were still falling back but not in their proper places.

Of course, the confusion was where it had always been, in the minds of men. There was still a residual interest in the war, but it was too early to take an historical interest and besides, there were more important things to do – make money, mainly. So many odd and contradictory things were happening that reading the newspapers was almost frustrating and you could only keep track of the things that interested you.

In Germany, for example, the American Military Government, AMG for short, had just revealed that 3,278,000 of 11,825,000 Germans questioned in the U.S. zone were chargeable for Nazi activities.

This was one area in which Clarence Webster kept himself informed. He had more than a passing interest, too, in the eventual outcome of all the war crimes trials and the ultimate destiny of the men involved. In April, Rudolf Hoess was hanged at the Oswiecim extermination camp in Poland where 4,000,000 persons had been executed at his command. Gernand de Brinson, Vichy Ambassador to the German occupying forces in Paris, was executed as a traitor by the firing squad in Forte de Montrouge, near Paris. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who built up the Luftwaffe and was Hermann Goering’s chief deputy, was sentenced to life imprisonment for slave labor activited by a U.S. court in Nuremberg. Dr. Hjalmar Schact, on trial before a German denazification court in Stuttgart, denied having been a “major Nazi offender” and said he took part in 4 anti-Hitler plots from 1938 to 1944. Both Carmen Maria Mory and Dr. Percy Treite, under death sentence for the Ravensbrueck concentration camp murders, committed suicide. And Herbert Backe, Nazi Food & Agriculture Minister, hanged himself in a Nuremberg jail. ...
  
Copyright 2017, Elaine Blackman

A personal update to friends everywhere

When my dad was about to turn 70, he wrote the following letter to a number of his friends. He gave typical updates on his life, probably of little interest to people who didn’t know him; however, it will fill in gaps for those who did. If you like Harry’s writing style, it’ll entertain you. And, it might encourage you to write a letter or email to old friends. Or, make a phone call.






28 May 1991 
To Friends Everywhere:

I have become one of the laziest people around. Even though I have spent the best years of my life in writing – so many hundreds of thousands of words – and still write a fair amount almost every day, I just can’t seem to find the energy to sit down and write letters. Those of you who send out annual letters, usually but not always around Christmas time, just to keep all your friends up to date on your families and your activities, put me to shame. I never even acknowledge receiving them. It’s not that I don’t love them. I read and reread every word. I enjoy them. I savor them. I just don’t acknowledge them.

Now, suddenly, the pangs of conscience are overwhelming me. The spirit moves me. The urge is upon me. So here I am, trying to put into words the things that have happened to me in the last five years since I retired. Retired from the government, that is, since I have never really fully retired, though I’m getting closer to it all the time. The fact that I will be 70 in a couple of weeks, and the realization that I am mortal, after all, is probably one of the factors that impels me to write this letter – that and a guilty conscience.

I retired in June 1986, at the age of 65, but my replacement, Herb Coleman, who was the Editor at Aviation Week, couldn’t get away from there until October, so I stayed on as a retired annuitant until he came aboard. Then, after lining up financing and people and other things, I started my newsletter, the Defense Media Review, in which I got a chance to do what they would never let me do for publication in the Pentagon (I did it for eyes only for a few selected officials) – namely, I got to comment on media performance in their coverage of national security affairs. I had two very bright young men working with me.

Everything went along swimmingly, as they say, for a couple years. Jeanette and I even got to do some traveling – to Israel in 1987, to Hawaii in 1988 – not as much as she wanted to do, but I still had commitments and deadlines. Then, on August 30, 1988, the day after we got back from a month’s vacation, two weeks in Hawaii and two weeks doing California, I had a heart attack. Well, not exactly a heart attack. It was diagnosed as severe angina, which, technically speaking is a warning signal that a heart attack may be imminent, and you better do something about it.

After an angiogram, which determined that one of the main arteries going to the heart was 90 percent blocked, they decided to do the angioplasty procedure, rather than a bypass operation. In the angioplasty procedure, they simply insert a “balloon” into the artery and press the blockage (cholesterol) against the wall of the artery, thereby clearing the passageway for the flow of blood to the heart. It’s much simpler and easier than a bypass, but it’s not feasible for everyone; it depends on exactly where the blockage is. There is no guarantee, of course, that the blockage will not return. Mine did, some six months or so later. That was in March 1989, just after we got back from a cruise in the Caribbean (six islands in eight days). 

I keep telling Jeanette that traveling can be hazardous to your health. So I got a second angioplasty and, according to the prevailing medical view, the odds are that the second one will last much longer. It’s now a little more than two years later, and it’s still holding, so maybe the doctors are right. Of course, an important element in recovering and staying healthy is exercise – aerobic exercise, to be precise. And, it goes without saying, I really don’t do enough of that.

By the way, an important factor in bringing on heart problems in the first place is smoking. And everybody knows that I smoked too much. In fact, from the time I was fifteen years old until the time I was sixty seven, well over fifty years, I smoked – two to three packs a day. Not only did it help bring about the coronary problem, it also did irreparable damage to my lungs. Looking back on it, it’s hard for me to believe that I was so dumb for so long. Knowing what we know now, it’s idiotic for smokers to continue smoking and it’s moronic for young people to start smoking. Anyway, I quit on August 30, 1988, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and, though I still miss it now and then, I have no real desire to start again.

By the end of 1988, the newsletter was becoming a burden that I didn’t want to carry too much longer. As it happens, shortly after I retired from the government, the College of Communication at Boston University established a Center for Defense Journalism and the Dean of the College invited me to serve on their Advisory Board. He also wanted the Center to start producing a newsletter. What he had in mind was very much like the one I was already producing – a commentary on media coverage of defense matters. So, for a very modest sum that did not involve a profit for me, I sold the newsletter to Boston University. It is now the flagship publication of the Center for Defense Journalism, and I am listed as a Contributing Editor, which means that I write an article now and then for them, and give them some ideas on what I think they ought to write about – all for free, of course.

For money I’ve been doing some free-lance writing and a little consulting for people who want to start newsletters or newspapers. I’m also trying to get into the fiction field, short stories mostly. The trouble is that I’m not hungry enough, as they say in the trade, which means that the motivation to try hard is lacking. Fortunately, you see, my government pension is quite generous, after almost 40 years of service (including Army time in WWII).

Last year I started taking some courses at the University of Maryland. One of the advantages of being over 65 is that you can go to school free here. One course in particular sounded intriguing – a course in modern military history, which starts in 1494 and extends to the present time. I found it fascinating and exciting. Also, humbling. There is so much I don’t know. As it happens, the professor used to work in the Army Historian’s office, and we knew each other slightly. I was truly impressed with the depth and range of knowledge he displayed.

When we got to the WWII era, about which I thought I knew a lot, I displayed my ignorance on occasion. He was very patient with me. Of course, most of the other students didn’t realize how truly ignorant I was. They thought that just because I was there that I knew more than I did. So, like the old saying goes, it’s better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. I tried to keep my mouth shut most of the time. One thing, though, that really impressed those young people, an attitude that was expressed very well by one when he said:  “You fought in World War II? Wow! My grandfather fought in World War II.”

Nowadays, when I’m out walking with my grandchildren, the young pretty girls never mistake me for their father. It used to be easy to start a conversation with them in the presence of the children, but now they got me pegged. “You must be the grandfather,” they say. I can’t imagine why, since I look as young and handsome as I always did.

That’s about all there is to the continuing story of my life. I’m now tapering off the work ethic and beginning to enjoy the retired life, especially the ability to yield to sudden impulses to take off and go where we want or do what we want.

With love and best wishes to all of you,
HZ

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Snapshots of Harry’s sentimental side

Sandy and her Zadie in 1984

I’m dedicating today’s post to a sentimental family occasion – the wedding of Harry’s granddaughter, Sandy. She is learning more about her Zadie because he saved letters and emails in computer files. The rest of us, too, are getting a closer look at Harry’s memories, beliefs, and relationships. He wrote this letter to a dear friend in 1994, when he was 73. (I changed the names of the people in the letter.)



Dear Mary:  It is one of the mysterious truisms of life that the male friends of a newlywed man are never fully at ease with his new wife. There is some obscure chemistry at work that makes the friend and the wife view each other with suspicion, or, at least, not with complete acceptance. There is, no doubt, another kind of chemistry at work with a female friend of the groom and his new wife, but that’s another story.

Anyway, even though we seldom see each other or communicate these days, I have for a long time felt that Mike and I were as close as friends of two different generations can be. In fact, I really don’t feel as though we are separated by a generation gap, probably because we shared some common experiences together. Until now, I could never hope to feel a similar closeness to Mary. I could only think of her as Mike’s new wife. But now, Mary, everything has changed.

Harry in the mid-1990s

The two articles you enclosed with your letter have convinced me that we share a common kinship. First, we are both criers. Second, we have learned to listen to what other people say instead of to ourselves. And third, we want to tell others about the things we’ve learned and the things we feel instead of keeping it bottled up inside. It’s taken me some 70-odd years to reach this understanding about myself. It’s taken you only thirty.

About crying, by the way, I can only say that I am easily moved to tears, and always have been. When I was a kid, I used to cry when the cowboy kissed his horse and rode off into the sunset at the end of the movie. (They never kissed the girl in those days; that would have been unmanly, and all the kids would have booed at such behavior. Times have, indeed, changed.) For years I tried to repress the tears as best I could, or to hide them, which is not always possible. Now, however, I go with the flow, so to speak, and I don’t care at all if people think I’m crazy. I’m sentimental and proud of it. Thus, I can shed a tear when my grandchildren hug and kiss me or when I think of all the joys my own parents missed because they died so young, before my children were born. So I’m a crier and your article on tears moved me – to tears – and made me feel very close to you.

You have a natural talent for writing, Mary, and from the perspective of a professional reader who has spent most of his adult years reading, writing and editing, I would urge you to forsake any other ambition you may have for a career and concentrate on writing. I can foresee a great future for you as a syndicated columnist, free to write on subjects of your choice rather than being confined to any one area of expertise. You should cultivate and nurture this talent, and just keep sending off articles to a variety of publications. I predict success for you in this field and if you have any doubts in your mind about it, banish them.

There is an old saying among pilots that the second greatest thrill known to man is flying. There are varying opinions among non-pilots about just what the greatest thrill is, but again among pilots, the greatest thrill is landing – safely, of course. But I can tell you as a man and as a human being that the greatest thrill of all is holding your own newborn baby in your arms and knowing that you created this miracle with God’s help and praying that it will grow and prosper and make this old world a better place.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes and, having survived that kind of experience, I can attest to the truth of that statement. But here is a greater truth – nobody can look at his own newborn child and not believe in God. I can’t tell you how delighted I am to hear your news. And let me say, for the record, that August is a good month. Jeanette and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary last August, the fifteenth, to be precise. It will be a great month to celebrate your first child’s birthday, and our 51st anniversary.

* * *

Here’s another snapshot of my dad’s sentimental side. In March 2014, a couple months before he passed away, he emailed the following reply to a relative who had thanked him for his Army service in the 1940s. The relative was prompted by someone’s emotional description of a WWII veteran who attended a model exhibit of the Vietnam War Memorial. (Again, I changed the names for this blog.)

Harry in March 2014

Dear Steve: Your email touched me deeply in many ways, and I had to think long and hard for the past week or so on how to respond. First, though, let me say how much I appreciate what you said, but I’m also a little embarrassed, too. I didn’t do anything special to deserve thanks or applause or, to put it another way, I only did what millions of other guys did, and to single me out is unfair.

Tom Brokaw got it right when he said we should thank a whole generation for what they did in WWII. It was the whole country, everyone, not only those who went to war but also those who stayed home and contributed to the war effort. Everybody was involved. I cannot describe or define the feeling of togetherness that permeated the country at that time. It lasted only a few years and it never came back.

Today, sadly, we are fighting a war, and most people are not involved or remotely touched by it. Those guys who have been fighting and dying and getting maimed in the Middle East wars deserve our thanks because they are just a tiny fraction of our people.

Anyway, what I did was so long ago that it is mostly forgotten history now. I’ll tell you who my heroes are, now. You are. You and Karen, who have the courage to adopt and raise kids in this troubled world and teach them the values and morals of Americanism and Judaism. You are what made it all worthwhile.

Love,
HZ

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Letters to professors shed more light on Harry’s life

Through this blog, I hope that people who knew Harry are learning more about him and keeping him close to their hearts. This is why I share many of the personal emails and letters he wrote to friends and family. Now we can see that even letters he wrote to his professors at the University of Maryland, in the 1990s, add details to the story of his life. Here are five of those letters.


17 October 1991 

Dear Ms. Towner:

I had thought that you would have been told that I was auditing your course when the class began, but it dawned on me that you really didn’t know until you asked and I confirmed it. What that means, according to the instructions they give us when we senior citizens register, is that we should not add to your workload unnecessarily. For me, it means that I don’t volunteer my opinions or impose my biases in class discussions unless called upon – and I frequently have to bite my tongue to refrain from expressing an opinion. It also means that I don’t hand in a lot of papers for you to read and grade. You surely have enough of that to do without me.

It does not mean, however, that I do not take the class seriously. On the contrary, I find it extremely interesting and informative. I have done a great deal of writing over the years, all non-fiction articles, books and essays. Fiction, though, is difficult for me. Such things as motivation, dialogue, characterizations, etc., all the things that emerge in novels and short stories, elude me. You, in this short time since the semester began, have helped me immensely. You have started me thinking and writing about things I’ve not experienced before and I find it stimulating and enjoyable.

Anyway, I want you to know how much I appreciate the opportunity to audit your class, and I want to commend you on the outstanding manner in which you conduct it. It helps, of course, that you have some very bright young students who seem eager to learn, but you are doing a superb job of eliciting their participation, and their response to you is a reflection of your exemplary performance as a teacher.


18 December 1991

Dear Dr. Moss:

I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your course, History 157: The United States From the Civil War to the Present, this past semester. Not only were you extremely informative in your presentations, your lectures were entertaining, as well. Of course, the period from the 1920s to the present is of special interest to me, since it coincides with my life span – so far. You shed new light and brought new perspectives to events in the American experience about which I have personal knowledge.

It is particularly illuminating to note that the great depression of the 1930s was preceded by a decade of Republican (mal) administration, just as the great deficits and recession of the 1990s was preceded by similarly disastrous Republican administrations. Is there a lesson for historians here? In my view, these past two and three quarters administrations have also set the civil rights movement back a generation or more, and not enough note has been taken of this sad development. In any case, I wanted to thank you for having made this a truly interesting and rewarding semester for me.


29 March 1993

Dear Dr. Belz:

I just want to tell you how much I appreciate your course in Constitutional History. As a Golden ID student who is simply auditing this course rather than seeking credits, I find the subject material not only highly informative, but positively fascinating. The older I get, the more I realize how little I know, not just about historical events generally, but about events that have touched me personally and about the times in which I have lived. Take World War II, for example, during which I served in the Army in the European Theater and gained what I thought was a first-hand view of events. It was not until some years after the war, however, after reading a number of books and listening to countless lectures, that I came to some understanding of what that war was all about and the strategies and tactics that governed its conduct.

And so it is with respect to almost all the events I have lived through during the years since then. I have come to the realization that I have a worm’s eye view of history, looking at events from the bottom up, so to speak, while historians like yourself have a bird’s eye view, an overview of events that derives from a systematic study. I have an enormous respect for the depth of knowledge you consistently demonstrate in the classroom, but even more than that, for the manner in which you go about imparting that knowledge to your students, including myself. 

And, in case you sometimes feel like the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness, let me assure you that many of the younger people in the class, the real students, are equally impressed. You are communicating to them. To me, especially, you are bringing new and refreshing perspectives to my understanding of the recent past. I am profoundly grateful for that.


6 March 1994

Dear Dr. Shulman:

I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your lectures. The reason I audit your course on the history of the U.S. from WWII to the present is to learn how a generation twice removed from mine perceives the times I lived through. It’s strange, very strange, to hear these bright young people discuss and evaluate those times and the events that shaped today’s world. In a way I have come to understand the despair that gripped my father’s generation when my friends and I discussed WW I with him and the events that he lived through.

When I talk about WWII today, which is very rare indeed, I find that many historians are little interested. (Historians, by the way, seem to have little interest in history, per se, only in devising new ways to interpret and define the past. All historians are revisionists – which is my generalization for today.) Anyway, I truly admire the way you present and describe events about which I have first-hand knowledge and the perspectives you bring and the pains you take not to allow your own opinions to come through too strongly.

Aside from my military service in WWII, I worked as a civilian in the Pentagon for nearly four decades. The nature of my work, both military and civilian, made it possible for me to meet many of the important figures of our times, which gave me a sort of worm’s eye view of events and policies. When you mentioned Milton Eisenhower in class last week, I was struck by my own recollections about him. You may recall that after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, President Johnson appointed Milton Eisenhower to chair a Commission to study violence in American society. The Commission was supposed to complete its work in six months, but that was not possible. When Nixon became President, he extended the Commission twice, for six months each time.

My office in the Pentagon was deeply involved with Milton Eisenhower in that study for the entire year and a half, and during that time I came to the conclusion that Milton was far brighter and more talented than his younger brother. The fact that President Eisenhower is now slowly creeping up the ladder in the polls proves what I said about historians. They conveniently forget how bad he was. Every time he had a press conference, his press secretary had to go out to explain what the President meant to say – just like Reagan, who knew next to nothing about what was really going on. 

Incidentally, I also knew Allen Dulles and was convinced that he was smarter and more talented than John Foster Dulles, who, in my view, was a terrible Secretary of State. I believe that many of the problems that beset the U.S. throughout the “Cold War” were in large measure attributable to his policies. This is especially true with regard to the Middle East. He practically gave Egypt to the Soviet Union and brought about a full generation of hostility to the U.S. among the Arab states that could have been avoided, with direct impact upon the prospects for peace between those states and Israel. He turned France away from NATO and he also completely destroyed any prospects for peace and stability in the Pacific after Eisenhower engineered a phony peace in Korea (that Korean war, though not many people realize it, is still going on, to this day) and then got us involved in France’s aborted colonial enterprise in Vietnam, from which we are only now beginning to emerge.

Ah well, I voted for Adlai Stevenson, twice, so I’m obviously not in step. But thank you for making life interesting for me.

1 December 1995

Dear Dr. Davidson:

As we approach the end of the semester, I want you to know how much I have enjoyed auditing your course on The Politics of the Presidency. As I pointed out when I asked your permission to attend, I have lived through most of the recent times discussed in class. My earliest recollection of political awareness was the race between Al Smith and Herbert Hoover in 1928. I grew up during the great depression of the1930s, and the first time I voted was in 1942 in the local and Congressional elections. The first time I voted for President was in 1944.

Aside from service in the Army during WWII, I worked for the government (Department of Defense in the Pentagon) from 1949 until I retired in 1986. During those years I met and spoke to every President from Truman to Reagan, all of the Secretaries of Defense and many of the Secretaries of State, participating in briefings on many occasions and participating in preparing the national security elements of Presidential speeches. In short, I was one of those backroom guys who helped prepare position papers, etc., and who had a worm’s eye view of many of the important events of our times and of the key policy makers who controlled and shaped those events. 

Despite my experience, however, the overall view of history as presented by you provided the kind of perspective I never could have attained by myself. I especially admire your low-key and objective view of events, so unlike my own strongly held views and opinions. I have to bite my tongue to restrain from speaking out on so many things you discuss in class, for fear of imposing my own biases on these young students for whom Nixon and even Carter represent ancient history. I also admire your ability to elicit questions and discussions from those young students. 

In any case, I want to thank you for having made this semester not only an informative experience, but an enjoyable one, as well.

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Reflections on the military-industrial complex

On June 30, 1994, Harry last edited this document in his computer files. I would think he wrote it for a publication. Similar to other essays on this blog, he talks about lessons from World War II.

Ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in January 1961, critics of military spending have cited his comments about the “military-industrial complex” to challenge the cost of national security. By quoting him they lend a measure of dignity and authenticity to their critical comments, even though they distort his intent by quoting him out of context. It is important to understand the context.

From the time the United States entered World War II in December 1941, it took more than two years of all-out effort to gear up our ill-prepared military and industrial resources. The whole country became what President Roosevelt called the “arsenal of democracy”. The production record achieved by industry in providing the weapons for the armed forces enabled the United States and Allies to forge a winning team.

There was an important lesson in that experience, one that George Washington had enunciated so clearly in the dawn of our nationhood. If we would prevent war, he said in effect, we must be prepared for war. We forgot this lesson after the war. Demobilization became the name of the game and the great arsenal of democracy not only fell into disrepair, it was substantially dismantled. When the Korean war started in June 1950, we found ourselves largely unprepared to conduct extended combat operations until our industrial resources could once again be geared up to produce the needed weapons. We must never be caught unprepared again.

President Eisenhower, tempered in the crucible of war and by eight years in the crucible of presidential pressures, brought wisdom, insight and perspective to his farewell address. Ponder these words, delivered in January 1961:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. …

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, and even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.         

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. ...

Author Harry M. Zubkoff

There is, indeed, a warning in these words, but it does not constitute a condemnation of the military-industrial complex, as the critics charge. On the contrary, it constitutes recognition of the essential nature of this new phenomenon in the American experience. President Eisenhower understood, better than most, the absolute necessity for military preparedness in today’s world and for the industrial base upon which preparedness rests. Implicit in his warning is the acknowledgment that the military-industrial complex is a necessary element of American life in our times, brought about by the nature of the world we live in.

So, to the men and women who inhabit that military-industrial complex, whose daily efforts insure that the United States will always be ready to defend its interests, this country owes a profound debt of gratitude.  

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Alongside the women at the airplane factory

Harry in 2000 and 1943.

He was always a feminist to me.

In May 2000, my dad emailed a friend about his work at Bell Aircraft Corp before he joined the Army during WWII. I discovered this in his computer files. I, for one, didn’t know he had his own “Rosie the Riveter” story, but I always called him a feminist! Little did Harry know, this simple email would give us a personal history lesson and set an example for writing down our thoughts and experiences.


From 1939 until I went into the Army in 1943, I worked for the Bell Aircraft Corp in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. In the beginning, there were around 200 employees engaged in the business of building aircraft, of whom about 50 were engineers/designers, and the rest, like me, were factory workers doing the assembling, riveting, bolting, screwing, etc., physical factory work.

There were also a few women, secretaries, bookkeepers, etc., whom the men all whistled at whenever they caught a glimpse of them walking by. Halfway through 1940, when the draft started taking men away in droves, the war industry underwent an explosive expansion, and that’s when women were actively sought and encouraged to enter the factory work force. (Initially, men were drafted for one year, but when the war started for us at the end of 1941, the draft was for one year plus the duration, which turned out to be for four more years.) Actually, between mid-1940 and mid-1941, some 10,000 people were added to the workforce at Bell, and the same thing was going on in war plants all over the country. Some were older men, too old for the draft, and others who left lesser-paying jobs to work in the defense industries, but most were women, thousands of them. 

By mid-1941, I was an old pro in the factory, at the ripe old age of 20. So I was made a foreman in the factory, mainly because most of the guys were being drafted so fast that I was getting seniority, and of course I had to teach the women how to do the required jobs – riveting, bolting, screwing and even how to use the tools, most of which operated on pneumatic (air) power rather than electricity. My section specialized in wings, flaps and ailerons, and part of the job required someone to crawl inside the wings to hold rivets on the inside, so size was important. Being small, I was able to do this, and the women were even better – smaller and agile. I got along well with them, though most of the men were merciless in harassing them. This was long before sexual harassment entered the vocabulary and I really felt sorry for the women and embarrassed by the crudeness of the men.

What became apparent, though, is that the women could do these jobs as well as or better than the men, and they were proving it every day in all the sections of the factory. By the time I left for the Army in the fall of ’43, there were 25,000 people working there, and maybe 20,000 of them were women. Mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, grandmothers, sweethearts, even a few lesbians, according to the men who said they could recognize these things. All white, though, no blacks. We had a sizable number of black men, which was a departure for American industry at that time, but no black women. The country was still a segregated society then, and we haven’t made a lot of progress since then, either. 

Anyway, I found the women to be smart, willing to learn, willing to work, willing to suffer humiliation and harassment, and willing to help in the war effort and to bring their men home quicker. They came in all sizes and shapes and temperaments and personalities, and I did my best to make them feel welcome and appreciated. I kept telling them that as soon as they became proficient at their jobs, I was going to go fight for them.
                                               
Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Photo from Airport Journals

Look closely at the thin, balding man on the right side of the photo, just behind the man stooping on the plane’s wing. (Click on photo to enlarge.) It sure looks like Harry’s back. The photo caption on the Airport Journals website reads: "Workers are busy on the P-39 Airacobra assembly line at Bell Aircraft’s Niagara Falls plant. By the time the war ended, Bell had produced 9,584 P-39s. A few examples managed to survive; at last count, three were still flying."

Israeli settlements are not an obstacle to peace

Harry in 2009

My dad would have turned 95 today. To commemorate his birthday, he surely would have chosen to post an article he wrote about Israel – so strong in his heart. Harry’s Israel-themed newsletter articles from years past are absolutely still relevant. He wrote this one in 2009. Feel free to share and discuss it with your family and friends. 


Are the Israeli settlements an obstacle to peace? Are they illegal, that is, in the sense that they violate international law as stated in the Geneva Convention? You don’t have to be an expert in international law or a “Philadelphia” lawyer to know that the answer is no. It is only in a world in which the United Nations contains a majority of nations with majority Muslim populations who, together with the 22 Arab countries of the Middle East and Africa, are virulently anti-Semitic, that they are considered illegal. But this is a question that lawyers and judges can argue over ad infinitum. The world consensus will always come out against Israel and it is futile to counter with logic and precedent against hatred and bigotry.

The provisions of the Geneva Convention adopted after WWII prohibit the forcible transfer of any part of the population of one state to the territory of another state which has been occupied as a result of war. This is the principle on which the critics of Israel denounce the settlements as illegal. But this principle was intended to protect local populations from displacement, as the Soviets and Germans had done with forced transfers of Poles, Czechs and Hungarians during the war. The Geneva Convention does not prohibit individuals and groups from moving to land which is not and was not part of a “state” and is not privately owned by any individual. In that sense, Israelis moving to and establishing settlements is voluntary, not forced, and those settlements are not meant to displace anyone living there – and they don’t.

The charge that the settlements are illegal cannot be justified legally and can only be regarded as political, but, as with any lie, it has been repeated so often and so widely that it has come to be accepted as truth. What is true is that the so-called occupied territories, which is the West Bank, is not part of any other state but is simply land over which there are competing claims. Jordan occupied it for a while but never claimed it or annexed it, and it came under Israeli control as a result of a war of self-defense. Israel has a valid claim to this land and, if the Arabs of that area feel they have a valid claim, too, these claims can be resolved by negotiation. Throughout the world, competing territorial claims have been resolved by war, with the victor making the final decision. Israel is the only country in history which, having won the war, must negotiate with the defeated enemy to resolve a land dispute. The problem is that there is no international court of law and justice that can be described as fair and impartial to hear the legal arguments.  

The question remains: Are the settlements an obstacle to peace between the Israelis and the Arabs? There is no evidence to support the claim that they are. In fact, all the evidence refutes it. Before the settlements existed, the Arabs were unwilling to make peace with Israel. It is the very existence of the state of Israel that is the obstacle to peace. Even before the state of Israel existed, the Arabs were unwilling to live in peace with the Jewish residents of the British Mandate in Palestine. We can go into that history in another article, but for now, let’s stick to the present.

The President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has stated that any new peace negotiations can only be conducted if the Israelis stop building settlements in the Palestinian territories. But what exactly are the Palestinian territories? They claim all the land, every inch of what the Unite Nations set aside for them when it partitioned one quarter of the Palestine Mandate into two parts, the smaller part for the Jews and the larger part for the Arabs. (Three quarters of the Mandate area had already been given to the Arabs for their own state, now known as Jordan.) The Arabs immediately went to war to eliminate the Jewish state, and lost part of their original parcel in their defeat. Now they want it back, despite their defeat in the war they started, and they still refuse to recognize the state of Israel. Can anyone seriously believe that the settlements have anything to do with it? In any case, in various agreements between Arabs and Jews, the question of the settlements was to be left for discussion in the final status negotiations. It was also agreed that the Arabs would have no jurisdiction regarding the settlements until the conclusion of a permanent Status agreement. It is important to note that all the settlements in the Sinai were uprooted and their residents relocated when Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel.  

Even if the Israelis were to stop building or even adding on to settlements, what do the Arabs offer in return? Would they recognize Israel’s right to exist? Sign a peace treaty? They have offered nothing. Meanwhile, Arab building continues and accelerates. For example, a new housing project is proceeding in Ramallah, which is planned to house some 10,000 people. And thousands of Arabs are moving into Jewish sections of Jerusalem, though the Arabs object strenuously when the Jews move into the Arab sections. There are more than a million Arabs living in Israel, some 20 percent of the population, enjoying all the rights and benefits of citizenship. It is a cliche, but it is also true, that the Israeli Arabs enjoy greater freedom and opportunity than they have in any of the Arab countries of the Middle East. The Arabs of Palestine, on the other hand, want no Jews in their territories and condemn the settlements as intruding on their land.

In Gaza, for example, the Israelis decided not only to stop building new settlements but to remove their existing settlements entirely, forcibly removing all the settlers and relocating them in other parts of the country. Did peace ensue? Hardly. Instead, an unceasing rain of rocket and mortar fire followed from Gaza into the cities and towns of southern Israel – more than 12,000 over an eight-year period, before Israel finally decided to retaliate. Did the UN condemn the ceaseless rocket fire from Gaza into civilian communities in Israel? No. But it condemned Israel for finally fighting back in an effort to stop the bombardment. In the face of this evidence, how can anyone seriously claim that the settlements are an obstacle to peace?

Also on the topic of Israeli settlement and building is his article “The Jerusalem Affair”, posted here in April 2016.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman

The Jewish People’s struggle toward independence

Harry Zubkoff, eternally photogenic

One year ago, I began this blog to honor my father’s memory and stay connected with his family and friends, far and wide. Because Israel was near and dear to his heart, today, on Israel’s Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut), I’m sharing two articles Harry wrote for his synagogue newsletter. He was 88 when he filed the original computer documents, dated January and March 2010. Most of us have never seen these articles, and some of us are learning lessons in Jewish history.

The relationships between the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East did not start with the establishment of the State of Israel. Long before Israel came into existence in 1948, the Arabs were opposed to the growing presence of Jews in the area, known as Palestine. While Jews had been coming to Palestine in small numbers for the past 2,000 years, the numbers started increasing in the late 1800s, when oppression of Jews in Eastern Europe stimulated emigration to Palestine as one of the few places open to them.

When Theodore Herzl organized the Zionist movement into a formal, recognized group and convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897, emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine picked up speed. Those Jews returning to Palestine were already talking about establishing a Jewish homeland there either under Turkish or German rule. Early in the 20th century, the Jews established a number of farming communities, most notably at Petach Tikvah, Rishon Letzion and other locations. They also started building a new city, Tel Aviv, just north of Jaffa. As the Jews built new facilities in Palestine, increasing numbers of Arabs came into the area, seeking to share in the new prosperity and opportunity provided by Jewish enterprise. By the time WWI started in 1914, there were about 600,000 Arabs and 100,000 Jews in Palestine.

The First World War put a stop to everything. It was hard on both the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine with outbreaks of disease, both cholera and typhus, affecting both populations. An Ottoman military government ruled the area and was detested by Jews and Arabs alike. The Ottoman Empire joined with Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Allies during the war, and many Jews fled the area to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army. A small group of Jews, however, organized an underground unit that provided critical intelligence information to the British which helped their invasion effort. Their help was but one of many reasons why Britain endorsed the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. At the same time Britain also promised the Arabs a state in the area in return for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans led by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). 

In the spring of 1920, and again a year later in 1921, and eight years later in the summer of 1929, Arabs, who opposed the idea of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, organized simultaneous violent riots and pogroms against the Jews in a number of locations – Jaffa, Haifa, Hebron and Jerusalem. Throughout the decade of the 1920s, other sporadic acts of violence by Arabs against the Jews took place, but never rising to the level of riots or pogroms. As a result, the Jews organized a self-defense force, the Haganah, since the British did nothing to protect them. A major instigator of violence against the Jews was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the foremost Arab religious leader, who later in the 1930s became a Nazi collaborator.  

In the late 1920s and through the 1930s, Arab antagonism to the Jews increased dramatically. They claimed that Jewish immigration and their land purchases, though legitimate, were displacing and dispossessing Arabs, even though all the economic indicators showed that the Arabs were benefiting from Jewish investment in the area. In fact, the Arab standard of living in Palestine was higher than in any other area of the Middle East, and Arabs were flocking there in record numbers to share in the prosperity engendered by the Jews.

Anti-Jewish violence was fueled by lies which the Arabs trot out periodically, even to this day, that the Jews were planning to build a Synagogue at the Wailing Wall, and thereby encroach upon the Temple Mount compound and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The technique of telling lies about the Jews in order to incite violence against them was perfected and expanded by Joseph Goebbels. As Minster of “Propaganda and Enlightenment” for the German Third Reich, Goebbels made lying about the Jews into an art form. “If you tell a lie big enough,” he said, “and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Thus, the Germans came to believe that the Jews were sub-human and perpetrated the greatest atrocity in human history, and the best documented mass-murder rampage. The Third Reich was obliterated in World War II, but the technique of lying about Jews to incite violence against them lives on in the Arab world and in some European states, as well. 

A public opinion survey taken in Europe just a few years ago disclosed that Europeans view Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. This kind of public attitude is a direct result of lies repeated relentlessly about Israel’s attempts to defend itself against incessant attacks by Palestinians and other Arabs. The most outrageous lies are told about the Jews: for example, a British report stated that Jews were killing Palestinians in order to harvest their vital organs; a Norwegian report stated that Jews were killing Christian children in order to use their blood to bake matzah, etc. The reporters involved disregard the tenets of their own profession – a search for truth and verification. Indeed, when confronted with questions, they declare that they do not know what is true, only what they are told. In Arab schools today, children are taught from earliest childhood to hate Jews and that their highest goal is to kill Jews and become martyrs. In Arab newspapers Jews are insulted and derided every day so that the Arab “man in the street” is conditioned to hate all Jews everywhere.   

Despite Arab objections and British obstacles, Jewish immigration increased substantially in the 1930s as the Germans tightened the persecution screws and Eastern European countries did the same. The pivotal point came in 1936 when widespread riots took place, which were dubbed the Arab Revolt or, in some media reports, the Great Uprising. Fully half of the 5,000 residents of the Jewish quarter in Old Jerusalem were forced to flee and the few Jews remaining in Hebron after the killings of 1929 were also evacuated. The Arabs were not only warring against the Jews, but against the British, as well, and as many as a thousand or more Arabs were killed in the fighting. 

In the aftermath, the Peel Commission of 1937 came up with a plan to partition the remaining Mandate area into a small Jewish state and a much larger Arab state. (Remember, more than three quarters of the original Palestine Mandate had already been given to the Arabs for their state, now called Jordan.) Meanwhile, in a further response to the riots, the British began restricting immigration of Jews, despite the growing evidence that Germany had embarked on a program of killing all the Jews of Europe. These restrictions culminated in the British White Paper, issued in 1939, which limited the number of Jewish immigrants into Palestine to 15,000 a year for five years, after which any additional immigration would be subject to Arab approval. In effect, this meant no more would be allowed, a situation which was intolerable to the Jewish people, especially in view of Germany’s inexorable move toward a policy of genocide against them.

*****

Beginning in the mid-1930s and throughout the World War II period from 1939 to 1945, the Arab leadership in Palestine maintained ever stronger ties with the Nazi government in Germany. The wartime cooperation was exemplified by a “fatwa” (religious edict) issued by the Arab religious authority in Palestine for a holy war against England in May 1941. In a meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1941, Amin al-Husayni, leader of the Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine, discussed Britain’s endorsement of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine. Hitler promised him that he would eliminate the Jews from Palestine after Germany won the war in Europe. During the war, Amin al-Husayni served with the Nazis in the Waffen SS in Bosnia. 

Meanwhile, the Jews of Palestine organized a 5,000-man Brigade, which served with the British Army during the war in Europe. After the war, the Brigade succeeded in spiriting thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, the remnants of Europe’s Jewish population, out of that forsaken continent and smuggling them into Palestine, under the noses of the British, who had steadfastly refused to allow Jewish immigration. At the same time, the Jewish leaders in Palestine, the Yishuv, as it was known, decided to make a major effort to bring the Jewish refugees into Palestine. They organized a huge illegal immigration enterprise using small boats and operating in total secrecy. Many were intercepted by the British and detained in makeshift prison camps on the island of Cyprus, but even so, during 1946 and 1947, some 70,000 European Jewish refugees were smuggled into Palestine. 

As details of the full dimensions of the tragic slaughter of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis in pursuit of a “final solution” emerged, it had a major impact on public opinion around the world and inspired additional support for the Zionist cause. And Britain, which had restricted every attempt to bring Jewish refugees to the area, finally decided to return its Palestine Mandate to the newly organized United Nations. 

The UN recommended that the Palestine Mandate be split into three parts – a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a separate area to include Jerusalem and Bethlehem under UN control. Neither side liked this partition plan, but the Jewish Agency, the de-facto government of the Jews, accepted it and campaigned for it. The Arabs rejected it.

All the Arab leaders in the Arab League objected in principle to the right of the Jews to an independent state in Palestine. But the UN General Assembly voted for the Partition on Nov. 9, 1947, with 33 countries in favor, 13 opposed, and 10 abstaining. The official partition was scheduled to take effect as soon as the British withdrew from the area, on May 15, 1948.
   
Almost as soon as the UN Partition vote was announced, the Arabs started carrying out attacks against the Jewish population. The consulates of countries that had voted in favor of the Plan were attacked, bombs and Molotov cocktails were thrown at shops and cafes, synagogues were set afire and many businesses looted.

With the British withdrawing, there was no force responsible for maintaining law and order. In December 1947 and January 1948, more than 1,000 people had been killed and 2,000 wounded. By the end of March 1948, more than 2,000 dead and 4,000 wounded. 

On May 14, the day before the British Mandate expired, David Ben-Gurion announced to the world that the State of Israel had been established in accordance with the UN Partition Plan. As required by the UN’s resolution, Israel agreed to ensure that all its inhabitants would enjoy equal social and political rights, regardless of race, religion or gender.

You can find several other articles about Israel in previous posts on this blog.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman